Silent build recommendations?

I was just taking a gander over at Puget Systems and their super-silent systems. I love the promise of near silence, but the pricepoint seems pretty dang steep considering I'm not scared of a screwdriver and thermal paste.

I'm thinking it's about time to upgrade my Dell-based HTPC/music-box (no tuners; just online video and a big disk of music). Frankly I'd love to go pre-built again, but I want quiet and only the big brands appear to be in my pricerange (under $1K for a non-gaming system).

Is there an equivalent of the Ars system guides for silence? Seems like the Puget folks use some fancy-schmancy parts and insulation, and I bet the devil is in the details for these quiet builds so would love to see some parts lists.

For an HTPC the problem is likely space. If you can use a 1m³ box, building a dead silent system is no problem. If it has to fit in a tight space, it gets troublesome.

Modern systems have gotten much better at that, though, especially since they consume so little power. Depending on how silent you need it, buying a solid case, good fans and a slightly oversized cooler in combination with some decoupled mounting for the HDD should be 90% of the way. Make sure to get a board with good fan control options.Beyond that, you need to get ingenious and/or special parts. I've e.g. seen a nice build of a passively cooled i3. It was a big heatsink standing upright, with the board screwed to it and a round piece of copper to connect the CPU to the heatsink.

How silent does it have to be, what does it need to do, what is it supposed to cost?

Good questions. I'd like pretty damned quiet, although don't know what that means relative to my current system. That one is audible in the background of a silent room at around a 6 foot range. But mostly quiet unless doing a lot of disk work with some ambient noise.

This doesn't need to be much. Mainly playing music to my stero (via analog, digital/hdmi eventually), video to my TV @ 1920x1080 (via HDMI) and staying quiet. I'm also willing to pay up to $1k for quiet - no idea on how quiet, but hopefully semi-inaudible to a person of normal hearing (I'm not going to claim cat-like senses)

Looks-wise I can go with a tower next to my media rack. That's what I have now and *everyone* is used to the look (even if they don't like it), but of course smaller/prettier is always better.

Spec-wise I'm thinking:

any core processor

passive or even integrated graphics unless I'm really missing a lot by not buying a card

I'm using an Asaka Cypher Ultra case (ThinITX), with an Intel DH61AG board, Celeron. There's room for a 2.5" drive in there, and the board has a mSATA slot. The supplied 40mm fan and heatsink are both very, very quiet. Inaudible unless I put my ear right against it. The fan is either stopped or idling at 200rpm unless the machine is very busy.

I'm using a 65W Sandy Bridge Celeron, which means it gets a little warmer than I'd like, and therefore the fans can ramp up a little - a 35W chip like the Pentium G2100T would be faster and cooler, so therefore quieter.

The case will take a normal 9.5mm 2.5" drive, which means topping out at 1TB at the moment. The WD Green 2.5" 2TB drive doesn't fit, it's a 15mm high drive and is hard against the southbridge's heatsink, which really screws up cooling in the case.

I should also mention that I'm an apartment dweller so closets aren't much of an option for me, otherwise I would go that route for all my networking stuff. This needs to be accessible to plug in devices for occasional charging / synching.

An actual box isn't an issue for me. Just want it to be quiet. With the size of modern hard drives I really only need room for a boot SSD and 2-3 TB 3.5" drive. I'll do local backups via USB3. There are times I'll even work on powerpoint from the htpc, so there are definite advantages to a full PC.

I guess I could also wait until Haswell (we're close) to get some more energy/cooling advantages.

Puget has been mentioned already. Look what parts they take for cooling and what cases.One of Intel's thin mini ITX boards with a 35W Pentium CPU should be fine. Those things sip power and hence produce no heat. Using a laptop PSU would also mean no moving parts to think about on that front. Still, the CPU would be fast enough for what you want and it would be pretty cheap. With a cooler meant to keep an overclocked K model cool, it should be possible to keep this thing below 50C as good as passively. Add one or two low running case fans of the kind Puget uses or look at SPRC for quiet fans. It might make sense to only mount them at the back, one in blowing one at the bottom, one out blowing one at the top.

If the HDDs aren't quiet enough, get some decoupled mounting thingy where they hang between rubber strings. No more vibrations. If this is still not enough, start stuffing the case with dense foam to dampen vibrations and swallow noise.

If you don't need a powerful system that requires much airflow to get rid of its heat and don't need to respect size constraints, getting silent is not hard anymore these days.

Separately picked up a tip to use a smartphone app as a quasi-SPL meter to at least give myself a kinda/sorta benchmark to shoot for. I know it's not as good as the real thing but it's free and easy to get.

For some research of specific components, I highly recommend using Silent PC Review and their forums.

Agreed--I got some good tips from reading their reviews there. Ask in their forums too, if you have any questions. I built a modestly-powered system in a Solo II case, and it can't be heard unless the hard drives are spinning. But I was surprised when a chose a pre-built system from Acer for a friend, and it was nearly as quiet.

Shame the boards are £200 and the case is £100. Even I can't justify that price, especially considering the continued shitty image quality of the Intel HD video. I'll stick to my old i3-550/GT610 based HTPC for the foreseeable future.

Depending on your SSD and case choices, that build is just over or just under $800.I went with the cheapest CPU with the HD400 IGP just to be on the save side, but you could drop that down and save a bit there, and probably another $50 if you can live with 8GB.Add another $20 if you want a BluRay burner, but it's probably not worth it.

My HTPC is in the Milo, with a Samsung 830 SSD, as it fits in with the audio components. The workstation is in the Lian Li with the mSATA drive, but would be easy to tuck away behind or near a TV. With the Noctua HSF and the Seasonic PSU, I have to put my head within a foot of the case to tell that it's on. Also, the HTPC has a low profile HD 7750 in it for a bit more performance when I need it.

I don't really like the super slim enclosures as they usually have buzzy 60mm or smaller fans, similar fans in the PSU, or use a power brick, and many do a poor cooling job, none of which I want to deal with.

The price of this aftermarket case is almost the cost of the Celery-version of the product.

£99 for the case£215 for the i3 NUC board (the non-TB one).£63 for a 64GB mSATA Crucial M4£40 for RAM£20 for wifi

Total: £437.

That's a VERY expensive little machine. OK, it's totally silent, and it'll be quick, but doesn't even have USB3. Buying all the parts separately like that is basically adding £100 to the cost. A similar spec NUC in the standard case is about £340.

Over long years of experience, I've come to believe, 'Silence is over-rated.'

I've poured hundreds of dollars into parts into silencing many generations of rigs. If I were to add the labor, it would likely be thousands of dollars. (I recall balancing the blades of Panoflex case fans with pieces of electrical tape to reduce their noise.)

The good news is that there are modestly priced off-the-shelf parts that are an order of magnitude quieter than their ancestors.

At this point, it takes a lot to screw-up a build that has me grating my teeth over its noise, I won't pay an extra US$200 to save an additional 2 dB.

Then again, it may be I've gone deaf from all the server room fan noise I've been exposed to.

I blame my reluctance to do anything special towards reducing noise these days on the neighborhood.Especially as it gets warm again, the neighbors' offspring plays outside. In the early morning birds do their job. That real silence that used to be there is no longer.If I would live in Alaska, I'm pretty sure I'd either want the last bit of silence or make the PC louder and draw a friendly face on it to feel more social.